Does the phonology of the language affect how quickly you learn vocabulary?

[sporedandroid]

So I used to dabble in Nordic languages as a teen. I also got really into Finnish music. So I often listened to hours and hours of Finnish music a day. I wasn’t interested in learning Finnish, but I picked up a few words. I later got interested in learning Hebrew. I found Hebrew words way harder to remember than Finnish words. I still do. Why would I find Hebrew way harder even though they’re both non-indo European and category 4? Could it be because Finnish sounds more Scandinavian even if it’s not the same language family?

[白田龍]

What helps you to learn is pattern recognition. Words aren't a random sequence of syllables, but have some indescribable logic to them that makes them much easier to be learned than non-words. The number of factors involved are just too many, but I suppose it hinges on how symilar is the word formation strategy is to the languages you already know. I also surmise that listening to uncomprehensible input may help your brain to find the patterns later on, when you actually try to learn the language.

[zenmonkey]

So I used to dabble in Nordic languages as a teen. I also got really into Finnish music. So I often listened to hours and hours of Finnish music a day. I wasn’t interested in learning Finnish, but I picked up a few words. I later got interested in learning Hebrew. I found Hebrew words way harder to remember than Finnish words. I still do. Why would I find Hebrew way harder even though they’re both non-indo European and category 4? Could it be because Finnish sounds more Scandinavian even if it’s not the same language family?

What helps you to learn is pattern recognition.

In a larger sense, this.

There are a lot of different things going on in a language that will make it harder or easier for you. It is related to elements such as structure, sound catalog, etc...

When you are learning vocabulary it's going to be easier if you can not only hear the sound but create the associative schemas from your own prior experience. Finnish is written with the Roman alphabet, Hebrew is not. How are you visualising the words you are learning? How are you associating them to prior experience?

Learning the word for "dog" is going to be much easier than learning the word for གྲསར. You can sound one out, have a immediate clue on how to link it to past schemas whereas the second will require that you build up a new model of representation. How grammar structures from root words will also make it easier or harder to map words together. Personally in Hebrew I have very little issue with managing gender suffixes but the verbal prefixes or locatives are always more confusing.

How לדבר is the infinitive of מדבר left me needing new ways of understanding. if I say מילים am I talking about words or something "from Yellim"?

Whatever your history or background it influences how you successfully approach a new language.

[Denzagathist]

It seems reasonable to me that it would be more difficult to learn vocabulary in a language that has a lot of unfamiliar phonemes. Not only do you need to remember the sequence of sounds for a particular word, but you'll also need to recall how to correctly produce those new sounds (or discern them from others, if listening). I also suspect this difficulty would be more commonly encountered in the early stages of learning a language, when you know fewer words to begin with and thus have fewer familiar roots to build upon. It was much more difficult for me to study Mandarin vocabulary in the beginning, for example, because in addition to being less familiar with the sounds of the language, I also had next to no "lexical building blocks" to work with. Every word consisted of unfamiliar sounds and unfamiliar roots. As I progressed, I became more accustomed to the phonemes of Mandarin and they required less conscious attention, as well as having more total words/roots at my disposal from which other words are formed.

But even if you know the roots, unfamiliar phonology could still pose some problems and increase learning time. I recently began studying Arabic, and even though I am familiar with many words already from having studied Turkish, Persian, and Swahili, all of which borrowed heavily from Arabic, the pronunciation is quite different in each language and so I have to pay closer attention while studying Arabic vocabulary in order to ensure that I learn the correct pronunciation. This is especially true for words that have been borrowed from Arabic into Persian, since Persian uses the same script and typically preserves the Arabic spelling, but adapts the pronunciation to Persian phonology.

[reineke]

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[Beli Tsar]

Finnish is written with the Roman alphabet, Hebrew is not. How are you visualising the words you are learning? How are you associating them to prior experience?

Learning the word for "dog" is going to be much easier than learning the word for གྲསར. You can sound one out, have an immediate clue on how to link it to past schemas whereas the second will require that you build up a new model of representation.

I notice that the 'Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice in government language teaching' from FSI (http://sealang.net/archives/sla/gurt_1999_07.pdf), which gets posted here occasionally (Reineke?) does emphasize how much harder it is to read in another script, and particularly on the cognitive load it imposes:

learning to process a completely foreign writing system automatically enough to focus on comprehension appears to take much more time and effort than many reading researchers had once thought (see also Everson, Harada, and Bernhardt 1988 and Bernhardt 1991). Without some degree of automatic processing capability, reading becomes a painful decoding process, leaving the reader with little cognitive energy available for understanding and interpretation. (p80)

If your mind is decoding the script, even subconsciously, it leaves a lot less mental energy for actually learning the word.

This definitely tallies with my (very) limited experience. At the early stages of reading in a language, there's no way to have internalized the script well enough for it to be natural. Vocab learning is still also reading practice. I find learning words in the other scripts I've tried (Persian, Hebrew, Greek) to be much harder, even leaving phonology aside.

[Deinonysus]

We'll, the factors that make these two languages hard are very different. If you have a good intuitive sense for cases and agglutination but struggle with noun and verb genders, the triliteral root system, and/or the writing system, you'll have an easier time with Finnish even though on paper the difficulty level is the same.

I'm not sure that modern Hebrew phonology is any harder than Finnish for a Germanic language speaker. Modern Hebrew was heavily influenced by Yiddish and lost a lot of its Semitic phonological inventory, so there's nothing that's too challenging.

[sporedandroid]

We'll, the factors that make these two languages hard are very different. If you have a good intuitive sense for cases and agglutination but struggle with noun and verb genders, the triliteral root system, and/or the writing system, you'll have an easier time with Finnish even though on paper the difficulty level is the same.

I'm not sure that modern Hebrew phonology is any harder than Finnish for a Germanic language speaker. Modern Hebrew was heavily influenced by Yiddish and lost a lot of its Semitic phonological inventory, so there's nothing that's too challenging.

I studied Icelandic, so I’m pretty familiar with cases and agglutination. The way Finnish changed cases reminded me of Icelandic from what I saw. I don’t have any real struggle with noun gender because my heritage language is Spanish. I guess I’m having trouble with the root system and writing system. Maybe knowing case systems messed with my Hebrew because it makes a lot of words sound the same to me.